Tech Aspiration: Grid @CERN - Ultra IT solutions for mankind

CERN GRID openlab: a partnership for tomorrow's technologies
CERN has always been in forefront of today's internet technologies - the foremost being the concept of WWW (World Wide Web) , the term coined by Tim Berners Lee , a CERN scientist.

CERN again is as usual into new ultra IT concepts like OPENLAB - This is an exciting partnership between research and industry that allows CERN researchers to assess the impact of ultra-new IT technologies on the LHC Computing Grid.

Grid computing is a form of distributed computing whereby a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally-intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing, and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery, economic forecasting, seismic analysis, and back-office data processing in support of e-commerce and web services.

CERN openlab was launched in 2003 with partners Enterasys, HP, IBM, Intel and Oracle.
In 2008, the CERN openlab partners are HP, Intel, Oracle and EDS.

The LHC Computing Grid : a global grid for high energy physics
The LHC Computing Grid (LCG) was launched in 2002 and integrates thousands of computers worldwide into a global computing resource that will be used to store and analyze the huge amounts of data that will soon be produced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

When the LHC begins operations in 2008, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data every year. Thousands of scientists all over the world already want to access and analyze these data! But the LCG must do more than just store this huge amount of data: it must also analyze the data, a task that will require around 100 000 PC processors. Also, the data should be made available to thousands of scientists across the world, in a completely seamless fashion.

The LCG already involves more than 200 sites in over 30 countries.

Dress rehearsals!
Scientists are currently performing "LCG dress rehearsals", sending simulated data between CERN and major computing centres worldwide to prepare for the LHC startup.